a philosopher's sketchbook

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This post is a goodbye note. If you’ve visited here regularly, you’ve noticed it’s been quiet here. I haven’t had much to add here. I’m closing this blog. When I start another, I’ll post a link to it. Until then, thank you for reading! I’ll leave this page up as long as it’s practical for me to do so.

One of the more popular posts on this blog is my review of beginning weight-lifting programs. While I haven’t posted much on my exercise habits in the past few years, I have kept on developing them. Hopefully, readers find this updated information useful.

I stopped power-lifting after I started feeling over-use injuries in my knees. Because I really want to be an old man who can walk all by myself, I decided to change my lifting habits. Another reason, is that I’ve enjoyed hiking and climbing mountains for longer than I have been lifting weights, and I found that power-lifting wasn’t the best way to get fit for mountaineering and climbing.

So, what have I done since I’ve stopped power-lifting? My goals have been to improve my climbing-specific strength, get in cardio-vascular shape to do long hikes and climbs, and maintain my joint health and mobility so I can continue moving through the mountains. To achieve these goals, I’ve taken up kettlebell lifting for strength-endurance; I do various body-weight lifts for raw strength development, and I do long easy distance runs and hikes to improve my cardiovascular endurance.

In my mid-thirties, I may be more fit than I’ve ever been before. My resting heart-rate is usually below 45 beats per minute. I can do a 14-mile hike in less than 5 hours. I can do many one-legged squats with my body-weight and more. I can do many weighted pull-ups and dips, and I placed first and second in a state kettlebell competition. All of this, while working a full-time job.

I built these results on the foundation of Steve House and Scott Johnston’s book, Training for the New Alpinism. It does a great job of describing how to get in good shape, avoid injuries, and achieve fitness goals as they relate to things you wan to do, like climbing a mountain, doing a race, etc.

To learn kettlebell lifting, the Internet is full of resources. Valery Federenko’s videos are great, and Pavel Tatsouline’s books are also helpful, but Pavel’s writing seems to be a little “testosterone poisoned” to me. My interest is learning to lift safely and well, and I don’t need machismo to do that. Federenko’s style is more focused on the lifts, and less on the attitude, which suits me better.

I don’t mean to imply that I couldn’t have done these things if I were still power-lifting. It could certainly be the raw strength portion of the larger fitness program, but I also think that one-legged standing and hanging lifts are more activity-specific to hiking and climbing. Lifts like bench press and back squats don’t train the activity specific muscles as well as other lifts can.

Three years ago, I wrote a post about measuring the quality of an idea by it’s usefulness or utility. Specifically, I applied that measure to religion. Lately, I’ve found the essays of Paul Graham, who is a former philosophy student who got lost in the field of information technology, like me. In fact, he got so lost, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science! Like my post, his essay, “How to Do Philosophy“, advocates for usefulness to measure the quality of ideas. He claims that most philosophers since Aristotle have been wasting their time chasing ideas that aren’t useful. This is an interesting idea, since eminent philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein have decried the end of philosophy for decades now.

In my post about “Turns“, I puzzled over why Heidegger and Wittgenstein changed their minds, or “flip-flopped”. Having spent several months re-reading Heidegger’s books, Being & Time, and Time & Being, as well as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his later work, I think there is a connection between viewing the quality of philosophy by its usefulness and the “Turns” of these philosophical heavy-weights. I’ll try to elaborate on that connection.

Graham’s “How to Do Philosophy” claims that philosophers have attempted to find the most general ideas that adequately explain an event or object, but in chasing that goal, they’ve fallen into a trap of studying things that don’t matter to people. What’s more, philosophers have a language problem that makes their job very difficult: in his essay, Graham illustrates how language obstructs our view of philosophical concepts because language is an imprecise tool, which he draws from Wittgenstein’s later writing. In other words, language allows for different meanings to apply to the same words, which makes it hard to tell someone exactly what you mean to say. Heidegger’s Being and Time is a case in point: in a sentence, the book is hundreds of pages dedicated to explaining the difference between the noun, “being”, and the verb, “to be”, and at the end, it is unclear whether Heidegger has made his point.

This difficulty of language is behind the Turns of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The early works of Heidegger and Wittgenstein attempt to capture the essence of some concept: for Heidegger, it is the existence of a human being, for Wittgenstein, it is the logical structure of language. Both philosophers wrote their early books in their 20’s in the 1920’s, when Logical Positivism and the bold belief that “scientific thinking” would make short work of the world’s problems, including the problems of existence and language.

The combination of youthful over-confidence and Logical Positivism produced favorable conditions for making big claims about complicated ideas, but their studies don’t “replicate” very well. In other words, people haven’t been able to use the methods and conclusions of Being and Time and The Tractatus to either reconfirm Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas or develop them further. The existentialists who followed Heidegger didn’t enact a scientific method of phenomenology, as Heidegger had hoped, because there wasn’t a method spelled-out in great detail anywhere in Being and Time. Heidegger’s phenomenological method that he used to build the elaborate conceptual structure of Being and Time produced different results each time another philosopher took it up and used it: Levinas’s and Sartre’s writing don’t resemble Heidegger’s early work. In the end, Heidegger’s method wasn’t much of a method; rather, it was a loose description of how to pay attention to to the world, you might say it is a 20th Century German attempt to replicate the 4th Century Buddhist Abhidharma perceptual system. At the other extreme, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is built on a surgically precise logical structure. In that book, language is conceived as an aggregation of logical facts that can be stated about the world. Consequently, the young Wittgenstein thinks that the world is a collection of facts: he conflates physical objects, a human’s observations of physical objects, and the “facts” made about those observations. Doing this cuts off the world’s limbs to save the head. In other words, Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis of the observable world reduces things to true linguistic statements, and consequently, he almost certainly misses many important details of the “fact” he seeks to describe because his analysis would deem them “meaningless”.

I think that the philosophical replication problem caused Heidegger and Wittgenstein to change their minds. In both cases, there seems to be an over-abundance of rationality and rigidity early in their writing careers, which gives way to a looser, broader, perspective in their later works. Both writers attempt to fit the world into a conceptual box, and they don’t mind cutting off important parts of the world to make it fit. Reducing their perceptions of the world to only the ones that fit their case makes their cases either useless or uninteresting for later thinkers, since later philosophers heavily modified or rejected the methods and conclusions in Being and Time and the Tractatus. I find it fascinating that after living a few more decades, both Heidegger and Wittgenstein changed their respective tunes, and their later works are much less precise, and much more searching and open-minded. The tone of the essays in Time and Being has the feeling of a blind person feeling about, searching for a lost object. Similarly, Wittgenstein’s later descriptions of loose groupings of word meanings contrast with his early precise definitions of facts and objects. It seems that, after failing to capture the world in the traps they designed in their younger years, Heidegger and Wittgenstein became content to build less restrictive enclosures to contain their more mature observations. And at least in Wittgenstein’s case, his later ideas are much more useful. Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language still rely on his later work more than they do on the ideas in The Tractatus. Heidegger’s later work is less talked about than his earlier work, but while phenomenology is still studied, his early work is not taken to be true: psychologists and neurologists do not use on Heidegger’s phenomenological work to conduct their research. Moreover, later phenomenological research, like that of Levinas or Sartre, is similar to the vague, searching language that Heidegger used in his later work: to my knowledge, nobody has attempted to design another Kantian-esque framework in which to hang the definitive typology of existence.

All of this is an attempt to reinforce the point that Graham made in his essay, and that I made in my earlier post. Those ideas that are useful, tend to get picked up by later thinkers and developed further. This happened to both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and we find that current thinking about their ideas resembles their later work, rather than their earlier work. In philosophy, as in religion, I think the metric of our quality and success ought to be, “What can we do with this?”, “Is it useful?”, rather than, “Is this true?” Often, truth and utility end up converging to be the same thing.

I’ve noticed, and experienced, an interesting human need lately — permission. People seek it, or at least I do. The author of Living a FI describes the problem in his process of becoming financially independent and quitting his job. The monster really rears its head when we’re trying to do something that is unusual, such as quit working for money in your thirties, or free climb the granite faces of Yosemite without protection. People question the motives of such decisions because they are contrary to typical behavior.

But is that behavior unreasonable or foolish just because it cuts against the grain? I don’t think it is. Doing something different or unusual from others’ paths is only that, unusual. A foolish or unreasonable decision could be typical or mundane. Living in perpetual credit card debt is a typical, foolish decision. It seems to me that unusual and foolish decisions aren’t necessarily related.

What seems to make folks link unusual and foolish decisions is that unusual things are, by definition, not frequently done, and consequently, we feel there must be a reason that unusual things are infrequently done. The implication is that unusual things are infrequently done because they are foolish, rash, unwise, or any other negative adjective you’d care to use in explaining them.This implication seems to drive us to seek validation for wanting to do something unusual. Enter: permission.

We feel that we need permission for many actions in life. Permission granting is built into our cultures. Parenting is all about permission. Rites of passage are, in essence, ways of granting permission to people by declaring them capable of certain roles or activities. Permission can function in different ways: it keeps us safe from activities that could be dangerous when we aren’t ready for them (e.g. using power tools or kitchen utensils before we’re appropriately trained in their use); permission can also lead us to view the world as a system of control, leading to thoughts like, “I couldn’t do that because I’m not allowed.”

If we look at permission in a negative light, it starts to cast shadows of doubt and fear, which can drive many of our decisions. Permission is one easy way to remove fear through an appeal to authority, “I can do this because my boss/teacher/parents said so.” However, wiping away fear by appealing to authority passes the buck by giving the agency of a decision to the authority who gives you permission. This takes away our own abilities to make decisions for ourselves. The parts of my life that I’m most proud of are the ones that I kept my agency in making a decision, or knowingly and willingly submitted to someone’s authority in order to learn or gain something. My proudest moments are the ones where I contributed to a project that I value, or I achieved something through learning, skill, and effort. I suspect that most folks wouldn’t say that their life highlights involve just receiving permission: that’s a bit feudal, isn’t it?

Permission can be valuable. Some rites of passage could be seen as a type of permission that would be valuable moments in a life, but rites of passage are often the beginning of a larger adventure. They aren’t the end, and this is the point: permission should enable you to do something greater and better, rather than simply serve as a checkpoint that allows you to pass the buck if something goes badly.

“What would you do if money were no object?” It’s interesting that we typically consider just one side of this question. To simply pose the question implies that you ought to imagine you had so much money you could spend it without consequence. However, there’s another way to consider the question. There is a set of people who live as if money were no object, but they have very little money. Willfully homeless people and wandering ascetics are are a couple examples of this set.

Why do people disregard an entire subset of possible lifestyles that satisfy the question? Perhaps it’s because living without regard to money is a riskier proposition than being filthy rich, or maybe, the social stigma against homelessness makes it an unacceptable option.

However, we can learn something from considering homelessness as an answer to the question, “What would you do if money were no object?” For the majority of us, we must choose among a limited set of options. To paraphrase the tag line of a popular blog, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” This maxim applies even if you were embarrassingly wealthy. Even though money isn’t a limiting factor of the wealthy, there are other details limiting their choices and lives.

Perhaps a better way to phrase the thematic question is, “What does your perfect life look like?” The Mad Fientist’s December 2016 podcast offered this reformulation of our question. This rephrasing implies that money is an object of consideration, and even if your perfect life involves having a billion-dollar net-worth, you must also account for obtaining it too.

By considering a broader spectrum of ideal lives, from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, we increase our options. For example, many people idealize the opportunity to live out of a backpack for months as they travel inexpensively through foreign countries. While there is considerable privilege in this dream, it is also a form of homelessness that carries its own risks. Why couldn’t one live out of a backpack or a car, moving from campsite to campsite every week or two? In the USA, this is a legal option, and you’d get to see many beautiful places doing it.

I want to note that I’m not attempting to glorify or idealize homelessness or poverty. Rather than ignoring it, I want to notice and consider homelessness and poverty. There are lessons to learn about personal finance by examining these issues. Moreover, we are much more likely to notice ways to help resolve these issues through these examinations than we are by turning away from them.

The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver, is a book about statistical predictions and forecasts. The primary question of the book is: how do we make predictions that capture more signal and less noise in a data set? This theme is similar to N. N. Taleb’s project in Anti-Fragile: how do we make decisions in a world we can’t fully understand? Silver’s answer to these questions involve a combination of empirical observations, statistical analysis that is appropriate to the data and question under review, and an answer that provides as precise and accurate a prediction about future events as possible. Avoiding overconfidence, over-fitting one’s model to the data set, and making too vague a prediction due to insufficient analysis are mistakes that Silver recommends we avoid.

One way to make better predictions is to use Bayes’s Theorem: (xy)/(xy+z(1-x))
xy
f(x) = ————
xy + z(1-x)
This theorem states that the posterior probability, f(x’), which is the probability of an event, x’, occurring after we’ve considered some previous evidence, x, y, & z. x is the initial estimate of the event occurring independent of any evidence. y is the probability of an event occurring if x is true. z is the probability of an event occurring if x is false.

For example, if you find a pair of underwear in your dresser drawer that does not belong to you or your spouse, and you suspect your spouse of cheating on you, one way you could use Bayes’s Theorem to produce a probabilistic prediction about the likelihood of your spouse cheating on you is as follows:

x, the initial estimate that your spouse is cheating — 4% (which is the national average of men cheating on their wives)
y, the probability of underwear appearing if he is cheating — 50% (essentially random, even odds)
z, the probability of underwear appearing if he is not cheaing on you — 5% (is there some other, innocent explanation for the underwear’s appearance?

Silver’s analysis of predictions and forecasts echoes that of Taleb in Anti-Fragile. Both claim that financial analysts are generally over confident in their abilities to predict financial markets, based on their performance. Both claim that our models for predicting most events aren’t as good as we say they are.

However, Silver notes some interesting exceptions, where our predictions are successful: weather and baseball, and chess. These fields yield to statistical analysis because they have a few common features:
– First, we understand the principles that cause the events pretty well. In other words, we can avoid the problem of mistaking correlation for causation in these situations. Weather, chess and baseball have relatively simple sets of rules that create the complex situations we observe. Consequently, we can use models to predict how these complex situations will evolve with some success.
– Second, there is a long history of recorded observations about these games and the weather, so we have a good data set to use in making our next predictions.
– Third, these phenomena occur regularly and frequently, so we get feedback on our predictions, which allows us to learn from our mistakes.

Phenomena that don’t share these three features — well-understood causes, a large and accurate data set, and frequent events — are harder to predict. The stock market is hard to predict because we don’t understand the complex set of causes that drives the two-dimensional change in a price chart, and extreme price changes don’t happen very often that allow us to test and learn from our predictions. Earthquakes and epidemics are hard to predict because they don’t happen very often and we have difficulty observing their causes: earthquakes are caused by forces hidden deep in the Earth’s crust, and epidemics have complicated generation and transmission paths.

The Signal and The Noise is a good foil to Taleb’s Anti-Fragile. It provides a useful introduction into statistical methods as well as many case studies where statistical analysis succeeds and fails. Taleb’s book focuses on the failures of statistical analysis, instead offering heuristics that allow one to navigate in an uncertain world, and while Silver’s book echoes many of the same heuristics — e.g. prefer long-surviving patterns/events over newer ones, in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary it is useful to assume the future will be like the past, it is not useful to assume that you are special or unique without convincing evidence to the contrary (a la financial analysts) — Silver also illuminates areas where statistical analysis has succeeded, which is helpful for the beginning analyst to see.

Suggestions for predictions:
– Make probabilistic predictions, not specific ones.
– Don’t be overconfident of your skills or predictions, it’s okay to say you don’t know
– Don’t focus too much on analysis at the expense of understanding your observed events, e.g. how much data do you have to analyze? Are the data linked in a time series, or is each event independent of the others?
– Be willing to change your predictions in light of new evidence.
– Try to be less wrong, as opposed to more right. I.e. Taleb’s “via negativa” epistemic method.

I’m re-reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s amazing how rigorous and incisive Heidegger’s thinking and writing are in this book. His goal is to explain the difference between Being (or the process of existing) and beings (or the things that exist in the world). It’s ironic how much writing he has to do in order to explain this very simple idea well, but simply looking at the table of contents shows how thoroughly and systematically he works through this project.

What surprises me about Heidegger’s career, is that he takes a “turn” after spending years elaborating the themes of Being and Time. In essence, he renounces his systematic elaboration and exploration of Being and Time for a more experimental and empirical style of writing and analysis. The corresponding book about ontology that he publishes after his turn is called Time and Being, and it is about 20% as long as Being and Time. What made Heidegger take this turn?

Another famous German philosopher took a similar turn late in his career. Ludwig Wittgenstein worked out an axiomatic system defining language, only to scrap it later on for a looser, less-rigorous, more adaptive model of language. Like Heidegger, Wittgenstein’s style of writing and analysis changed drastically when he began his new project.

Are these only two thinkers’ idiosyncratic careers in philosophy, or is there something to note in their rejection of a certain type of systematic thinking? If they are simply idiosyncrasies, how have their works — both young and old — garnered such attention from popular and academic readers? If there is a deeper issue in their respective ideological turns, what can we learn from their career paths?

One maxim I heard in high school was an analogy to erosion applied to human life: “Aging knocks off your sharp corners.” I understand this to say that our attitudes break down to become more general and adaptable as we age. I wonder, is this what happened to Heidegger and Wittgenstein? If so, is there a way for us to determine which version of these thinkers is more useful, powerful, effective, or somehow “better”? Are the latter Heidegger and Wittgenstein wiser and better-shaped than their younger selves? Are the younger selves sharper and more incisive? Is there a way that we can tell?